The Eliot Girls (13 page)

“Your earrings too,” he said.

Only then did she remember that she was wearing diamond solitaire earrings. How he must loathe her.

She handed them over.

“Thanks, cunt,” he said in a singsong voice, as though it had all been a game. Then he released her arm and fled.

She remained pressed to the wall, still feeling his powerful hand
on her arm. A streetlight flickered and she snapped to attention, as if
someone had slapped her. She picked up the keys and unlocked the door, fumbling. She checked to make sure the door was locked behind her at least five times before running back up to the staff room.

The light was still on inside. She thought that she must have forgotten to turn it off when she left, an instance of the kind of carelessness that Larissa was always correcting. The urge to dwell on the alternate reality was powerful. If she had only remembered her purse in the first place, she would be in her car now on the way home. She pictured herself driving home through the wet streets, listening to
CBC
, and then at home in the kitchen, eating the leftover lemon pound cake Richard had brought home the day before from a work party. Shaking and out of breath, she stood, perplexed, in the middle of the room. Her purpose—to call Richard to come get her—had been so clear as she'd run up the stairs, but her mind was now blank. She couldn't remember whether she had double-checked the rear door to make sure it was locked. Should she go back down and lock it or barricade herself in the staff room and get on the phone? Should she call Richard or the police? Even as she began to catch her breath, her hands continued to shake uncontrollably.

The door to the staff room creaked open, and a scream began to rise in her (though screaming would have been pointless), until she saw that it was Henry Winter, holding a pile of brown file folders.

“Ruth,” he said. “I didn't know anyone else was here.”

“I was just mugged,” she said, astounded by how normal her voice sounded. She wondered whether he would think she was lying for attention. As she spoke, she started to shake more strongly, and her teeth chattered, though she was not cold. The purely physical reaction of her body puzzled her. She didn't at all feel like crying.

Henry advanced on her quickly. He seized her shoulders firmly.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“No, I'm fine,” she said. “I don't know why I can't stop shaking. It's stupid.”

“You were assaulted,” he said.

“Nothing really happened. I only had some jewellery. I'd forgotten my wallet in here.”

“Ruth,” he said, with an edge of impatience. His grip on her shoulders seemed almost to be holding her up. She had never been so close to him; she was too close, really, to see him at all. She sensed that he had come out of the shower not long before—his silver hair was dark with damp, though it was no longer raining, and he smelled of soap. End-of-day stubble shadowed his cheeks and chin, some of the hairs a stark white shining in the expanse of grey.

“He called me a ‘cunt,'” she said wonderingly. “I don't…I was so compliant. Why would he say that?” She found it odd that the name the man—the boy?—had called her felt like the true violence, more than his theft, more than his brutal hand on her arm.

“That kind of hatred is like an ideology,” Henry said. “It has nothing to do with you.”

He spoke with effortless authority, and for some reason—perhaps because they had no relationship—she believed him in a way that she would not have if Richard said the same thing. She still had the sense that his hands were keeping her upright, and though a part of her felt deeply foolish, she thought that her numbness must be protective in some way, that without it she would be feeling too much: the burgeoning bruise on her upper arm, the soreness of her head where it had hit the brick.

The lights, so reassuring when she had first burst into the room, now seemed excruciatingly radiant. She knew what a wreck she must look—her hair disheveled from a post-school dash to Starbucks for a coffee, her eyes red and swollen and stinging as though she had been weeping. All the things she usually ignored about her face—the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, the violet circles under her eyes, the occasional spots of sun damage—she became freshly conscious of through Henry's first sighting of them.

“It's over, Ruth,” he said. “You're fine now.”

She wanted to tell him what had happened, in detail, but speaking felt frivolous. She was afraid of boring him, of being histrionic, of making more out of the incident than was appropriate. When he loosened his hands, she retreated to the sink for a glass of water. He took a step forward as if to follow her, then stopped. Looking at him from the sink, she could see him more clearly. As perplexed as he looked, as aimless, standing in the middle of the room with his arms hanging loosely at his sides, the light served him better than it did her. She felt watched by her former self, who thought Henry an ass, and was embarrassed by her antipathy towards him, which she had taken no efforts to disguise.

“My mother gave me that necklace for my birthday,” she said. “It was the last thing she ever bought for me.”

“I'm sorry.”

“How long have you been here?” she asked. “I didn't see your car. I mean, there were no cars but mine in the lot.”

“I'm parked in the driveway out front. I was only hurrying in to pick up some essays I forgot earlier.”

This reference to essays brought the room back to her. Her legs were wobbly, and she leaned against the counter, pressing her hand to her forehead.

“It's really the necklace,” she said. “That's all it is.”

He reached her in two long strides and grabbed her shoulders again. “What do you need?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she said, faltering. She had a sense of herself as an old woman, lost in a fog of senility.

“Ruth,” he said.

He looked very serious, and she had a flash that he was going to slap her, as people in shock were slapped in movies. But instead of the crisp thwack of his palm on her hot cheek came his lips. He seemed to be giving himself over completely to her, reserving nothing in the event of rejection. “What are you doing?” she wanted to say, but she was embarrassed, overcome by the need to be polite. How could she reject him and still face him the following day? To object would be to expose her own lack of sophistication, a defect that struck her as pathetic in a way that the absence of family loyalty, of basic morality, was somehow not.

Henry's warm hands were gripping the back of her neck almost roughly, and it was only on instinct, she was sure, that her hands travelled under his shirt to his back, to the small patch of hair just above his belt. She wanted to laugh at the silliness of it. Shouldn't some honourable outrage have come surging up from the core of her? But no such fount released. And as the seconds passed, the question of rectitude evaporated. She was not herself. She was not in the place where she walked every day, in all its practical familiarity, in the place where she and Henry Winter were people to whom this had not happened, where they were virtual strangers. What she might think of this on a different day, from a different vantage point, was irrelevant. The room faded from the periphery of her consciousness, and they were suspended in a small space that enclosed only their two bodies. Henry was holding her face now, and she kept her eyes closed, sensing that his were open.

How could something that had never occurred to her have such a feeling of inevitability? She was aware of how strange it was that the possibility of this happening—with Henry or anyone—had never entered her mind. Yet it was happening. She didn't know how, or why, but that was part of the pleasure, that was part of the painful, rapturous clenching in her stomach. It seemed more right this way than if she'd been anticipating and hoping all along. Had she ever felt this way before? This falling inside? His hands were under her shirt, pushing it up in front, then travelling the length of her torso up to her chest, under her bra. She heard herself utter a faint moan, and was embarrassed.

He told her afterwards that he had never been in such a state. From the second he had seen her in the middle of the staff room, her streaked face and tangled hair, her disoriented helplessness, he had known that what he was feeling was no longer deniable. When she told him what had happened outside, he had wanted to kill the mugger. His first instinct had been to tear out of the building and see if he could find him, though he had never been in a physical fight in his life and suspected he would be outmatched if it came to that. But he had realized that the mugger would be long gone, and that, even if he wasn't, Ruth needed him. He could smell the rain on her hair. And then another feeling, a feeling he shouldn't have had, began to rise in him. He was envious of the mugger. He wanted to kill the mugger, and he wanted to be the mugger, to be the man who had been so close to her, who had seen her so raw, so vulnerable, in a way no one else had. He wanted to be the man who pressed her up against a brick wall and felt her force recede under his power. He wanted to feel her against him, under him, locked with him in a moment from which there was no return to normal.

For the time, though, he said nothing. And she needed him to say no more than he already had, when he murmured her name with new understanding, as if its meaning had finally become clear to him.

 

 

Cha
p
ter
S
even

IT WAS SEVERAL WEEKS
after Ms. McAllister's announcement about the resurfacing of the flasher, and the happy furor the news had created was dying down. Although the Eliot girls' appetite for scandal was endless, the power of any single crisis to captivate long-term interest was weak. There was always a new outrage, and mass histrionics tended to recede as rapidly as they had arisen in the first place. In the eight weeks that had passed since the start of school, Audrey had watched this ebb and flow with a kind of seasick fascination. First had been the outcry when Tara Dinnick, one of the best basketball players, had decided not to go out for the team because her free time was being eaten up by her attendance at her new boyfriend's soccer games. Then the soccer team had suffered a blow when an unreasonable referee with an obvious bias for Branksome had caused the loss of the first game of the season. The drama department proved no luckier when Laura Willis strained one of her vocal chords and had to give up her lead role in
Man of La Mancha
. The school-wide wail inspired by these events had stunned Audrey at first—dire predictions were made, conspiracy theories were hatched, a curse was spoken of—but she was finally figuring out that the intensity of reaction was unmatched by depth. Ferocity of opinion was just another way in which Eliot girls were bound together, sealed from the outside world.

One morning, Audrey was sitting in her usual spot in the chapel when a small commotion started up in the aisle. The entire row of girls seated in front of Audrey stood in a fluttery panic and fled the pew. A spider, it seemed. Ms. Glover pushed unceremoniously past the crowd, flicked the spider off the bench, and ground its carcass brusquely into the floor with the toe of her running shoe. “Enough silliness,” she barked. She then tried, without success, to herd the girls into the pew as they fought over who would sit nearest the squished body. “Bravo, Ms. Glover. You're a hero,” said Henry Winter, standing just behind the congestion. He glanced over at Arabella and nodded with a vague smile. Arabella returned a little wave.

“You're
my
hero, Mr. W.,” said Whitney.

“That's Dr. W. to you,” Arabella replied. “He didn't spend, like, twenty-five years in school for bitches like you to call him mister.”

“Language, girls,” Henry said.

Whitney's mouth fell open. “Girls?” she exclaimed. “Girls? What did
I
say? Dr. W., watch the favouritism.”

He laughed softly and left to find a seat, his posture slightly slumped as though it were the end of a long day.

Audrey listened to the exchange with interest. It was widely known in the class that Arabella's father had died when she was a baby; the tragedy significantly enhanced her celebrity. Occasionally, when another girl in the class mentioned her own father, Arabella withdrew to her desk to place her head sorrowfully in her arms, a posture that reliably drew to her a crowd of girls offering solace. Henry Winter was her new stepfather. Unlike Audrey, though, who continued to be troubled by the complexity of having her mother in her daily world, Arabella seemed not to feel her stepfather's presence as any kind of hindrance. Sometimes Arabella referred to him sarcastically as her “pappy”; otherwise, the exchanges Audrey had witnessed betrayed no personal relationship between them.

Arabella's disdain for teachers was so significant that it was difficult to imagine her living with one. She was, however, a master of an atypical breed of self-control. While she made it known to everyone that Ms. Glover's breast shelf desperately required more support, that Ms. Massie-Turnbull should buy a bottle of Head & Shoulders (and while she was at the drugstore, she could get some dental floss for Mr. Marostica), she was never anything but entirely sweet, almost doting, during her interactions with them, and indeed it added to her contempt that their affection was so easily procured. Seeing Arabella and Henry interact outside of class was mildly rattling to Audrey. The significance of this proof that Arabella existed outside of Eliot did not escape her.

Arabella turned to Whitney and said, “Dude was in the bathroom for like twenty minutes this morning. I kid you not.”

When the chapel had filled up, Larissa took to the platform with a brisk energy that, though not dissimilar to her usual vigour, seemed to contain an edge of anger. She gripped the sides of the podium, frowning at a cue card in her hand. The girls around Audrey shifted with nervous excitement and whispered their speculation that there would be imminently unleashed a mass reprimand over one person's wrongdoing. Larissa McAllister's blanket rebukes were not entirely unwelcome. Hilarity blossomed in direct proportion to her fury. The terror and shame she believed she produced, and enjoyed witnessing—the girls rendered silent, studying their laps in stunned humility—were in fact the effects of amusement suppressed. No one could be truly repentant that an unnamed grade twelve student had been spotted eating McDonald's in her school uniform, an act of bad taste strictly against the rules. Upon hearing that a grade nine student had failed to offer up her seat for an elderly woman on the bus, few could feel the level of intense personal guilt Ms. McAllister considered appropriate. No one agreed that public gum-chewing was an offence that brought down the reputation of the entire school. The lectures these gaffes inspired were an enlivening diversion from the ordinary routine. They were imitated for days.

Tapping her cue cards, Ms. McAllister brought everyone to attention. Even before she opened her mouth, Arabella Quincy was stifling giggles. But what Ms. McAllister ended up saying was not what anyone had expected. She had been informed that morning of a death in the extended Eliot family. Martha McKirk, a former member of the grade eleven class, had died in a car accident over the weekend. It would be boorish to get into the particulars, she said—here she cleared her throat and pursed her lips, perhaps stifling a smirk, for there were few things she enjoyed more than withholding particulars—but a memorial assembly would be held the following morning, and although she trusted that the girls would not allow the news to distract them from their studies, they were permitted to avail themselves of the therapeutic support of Ms. Loveland, the guidance counsellor. A regular assembly followed, though no one was able to pay attention, and Ms. McAllister spent the duration peevishly shushing the spreading chatter.

Later, Ruth told Audrey that if Larissa seemed angry, it's because she was. That morning, she had been planning to unveil her plan for a new inter-school event that would be part educational and part fun. An amalgam of math, literature, and obscure trivia, it would be like an Olympics for the brain. The idea seemed so inevitable, so teeming with social and academic possibilities, Larissa was amazed that no one had conceived it sooner, and she was happily plotting the wording of her announcement when she received the sombre call.

Ms. McAllister and Martha McKirk had a tempestuous history. Martha McKirk had started at Eliot in grade one as a submissive, bucktoothed girl with math skills far exceeding her grade level, but somewhere along her way to what Ms. McAllister hoped would be
MIT
, she got derailed—perhaps, the theory went, because her mother had left her law career to pursue life as a yoga instructor—and she could no longer commit to Eliot's vision of excellence. Dying her blonde hair black was the first sign of what was to follow. The nadir of her contributions to Eliot was showing up drunk to the carol service at Christmas and singing loudly off-key all through Nikki Sanderson's solo during “Once in Royal David's City,” and then disrupting Ms. McAllister's reading from the Gospel of Luke with a noisy release of false flatulence every time Ms. McAllister said the word
Lord.
It was agreed during a subsequent conference with Martha McKirk's parents that it would be best for Martha's class, and for Martha herself, if she were withdrawn from Eliot.

After the phone call, Larissa had deliberated for fifteen minutes about whether to delay the announcement of Martha's death and proceed with her original plan. In the end, though, she knew that she could not. So if she seemed angry in assembly, it was not at the tragedy that had stolen a young life, it was at Martha McKirk, for upstaging her once again.

Nowhere, however, were Ms. McAllister's true feelings in evidence the following morning in the chapel as students gathered for the memorial assembly. An ambience of forced solemnity had overtaken Eliot's corridors. The gleeful gossip had abated, and all were united in understanding the importance of projecting the spirit of grief. The students filed quietly into the chapel, which was furnished with poster-sized, sepia-toned pictures of Martha engaging in a variety of Eliot activities. The sepia tint had made Martha's image timeless and, in removing her coarser modern edge, had conferred upon her a comforting lack of nuance. She was a pigtailed first grader, beaming a guileless smile full of missing teeth. She was a head-geared seventh grader, reading
The Velveteen Rabbit
to the Junior School. She played soccer. She spiked volleyballs. She studied a Bunsen burner. Thus contained, Martha was the very incarnation of the ideal Eliot girl. Conspicuously absent were images of Martha post tar-black hair, save one, where she was bundled in winter gear and a wool toque. Audrey was amazed by the sheer number of photographs (and by the appearance of Ruth in one, looking much older than her age in a dated outfit, her hair feathered and sprayed in place, her neck swallowed by mountainous shoulder pads, as she helped Martha, dressed as a bunch of grapes, carve a pumpkin for a Halloween party). The gallery gave the impression that Martha's entire life had been spent in Eliot. The rest was an ellipsis.

The service began with a hymn, “The Lord's My Shepherd.” Ms. Massie-Turnbull accompanied on the piano, leaning into the chords soulfully. She had dressed in black for the occasion, but because she favoured happy colours, the only black items she had been able to locate in her closet were a faded black sweatshirt, black cords worn grey at the knees, and a black plastic headband. When the singing ended, Ms. McAllister ruffled the pages before her and surveyed the room disapprovingly, unwilling to begin until the motion had subsided and all eyes were dutifully transfixed on her.

“‘It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live,'” she said with an unnatural calm, as though practising her radio voice. “So said Marcus Aelius Aurelius, and when I think of the short life and tragic death of Martha McKirk, no words seem more appropriate. Although Martha's life was cut short, we can take solace in the fact that she must have met her end peaceful in the knowledge that the charge of never beginning to live could not be laid against her. All of us who knew Martha could not fail to be touched by her powerful presence, her refusal to be complacent, her courageous resolve to live each moment of her life fully—values, I dare say, she learned right here at George Eliot Academy.”

She went on to give a speech about Martha's time at Eliot, or more precisely, the positive effect of Eliot on Martha's life. She spoke fondly of Martha's math skills and lamented the fact that they would never reach their full potential. At one point, she lost herself in an extended digression about the qualities of the ideal Eliot girl and ventured that such a person knows the value of words and uses them wisely, as in the instance of asking for tape. This was a personal pet peeve of hers and came up regularly in her lectures. The ideal girl, she said, understood the meaning of the word
borrow
, which means a temporary loan with the implication of a speedy return. Students too often came to her office saying, “May I borrow some tape?” These girls, of course, didn't mean “borrow” at all. They were asking if they could
have
some tape. Here Ms. McAllister paused and cleared her throat. She was heartened to recall a time not long past when Martha McKirk appeared in her office, asking if she could have some tape. Such memories could not be overvalued. She concluded with an invocation of Gandhi, transforming his philosophical observation “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever” into a firm injunction to all girls to study hard “for Martha's sake.” Then she stepped away from the lectern, saluting a photograph of Martha presenting a tray of brownies at a bake sale.

Girls from Martha's class hugged each other in the back rows. Elsewhere, students sniffled discreetly, dabbing their eyes with damp, balled-up Kleenex. A strangled whoop sounded behind Audrey, and she turned to find Arabella Quincy shuddering in a display of full-bodied sorrow that seemed somehow disproportionate to the actual number of tears being produced.

Ms. McAllister now invited up to the front any teachers and students who wished to express some concise thoughts about Martha. This portion of the service was seen as an opportunity to delay first period for as long as possible, and girls clutching scraps of paper flooded the platform, crowding the centre in whispery disorder until Ms. McAllister, with the instructive hand gestures of a traffic cop, directed them into an orderly line. The microphone underwent many adjustments and screeches as girl after girl came forward to seize her moment. Plentiful were stories about childhood experiences with Martha, roller coaster rides at Canada's Wonderland, slumber parties, horror movies. Kate Gibson told a long story about a Saturday spent volunteering at the Daily Bread Food Bank, allegedly Martha's favourite charity. A full twenty minutes later, Ms. Loveland took to the microphone and offered a short sum-mation of Martha, submitting that she was an “open spirit.” The mawkish New Age ring of this label seemed to please everyone. “We always lose our open spirits too soon,” she said, sniffling.

As the press of girls departed to return to their seats, an insignificant figure hidden by the shadows at the back of the platform moved. A stool, being dragged, scraped the wood floor. It seemed to Audrey later that a full minute must have passed before the obvious became clear to her. Not until the chords had begun their tribute, not until the words “I have no doubt Martha is smiling down on us now” had been spoken, did she actually understand that Seeta Prasad was performing “Candle in the Wind.” Seeta made the most of her moment, playing the song at a funereal tempo, glancing occasionally at Martha's pictures with a compassionate smile. Bowing her head, she seemed satisfied, as well, by the response of the student body—she could not claim responsibility for the tears, to be sure, but they must have struck her as stirring confirmation of her power.